dark water
by vivafiction
Summary: but she's supposed to let these feelings drift to the bottom of the lake -— katara & zuko. s3, the painted lady.


**title** — dark water  
**pairing** — katara & zuko  
**warnings** — terrible title warning, nothing else worthy of note; i like the ocean  
**etc** — this is for my ultimate senpai, beanaroony, just a small token of my appreciation for your talents, my love

…

This water is salvation for Katara so she wades through it with some resistance, mud climbing across her midriff, clumped on the ridge of her hips. The crescent moon slips in and out of the clouds but she works to the hum of cicadas and the sounds of impending summer buzzing in the middle of the night.

She siphons the dirt and grime from the section of water she stands in, her body swaying with graceful lunges until she sweeps it aside. The clear body of water glitters back at her with a partial reflection of the sky.

Katara smiles at this progress.

…

"What _exactly_ are you doing in the Fire Nation?"

She flinches because she triggers a pain response with the expectation of cruelty from the Prince, but she's only harmed herself, entangled herself in her own defensiveness. It's a delayed pain that weaves through her when she meets the gaze of those starlight eyes, thoughts lacing together with the delicacy of a silk spun web inside of her.

_It's a scar,_ her memory hisses bitterly, _it can't be healed._

"Waterbender," he snaps, and Katara jerks backwards through the mud, looks up at him. Entrenched in mud and trash and filthy, dirty water, she expects his privilege and his scathing comments to rain down over her as she stands there, but the hardened line of his jaw clenches and unclenches, "…Katara," he corrects, his voice lilting with concession.

_He can't be healed,_ her memory tells her, but she throws her hand up at him expectantly, rolling her eyes.

He stares at her in shock and Katara sees him as human, just for a flickering second, before he clasps her hand and grinds his boots into the dock for leverage. His other hand finds her waist, burns into her so much that she's surprised her dark skin hasn't turned darker.

He lifts her with ease and earned grace, and wants nothing to do with her body the moment she stands on the dock, soiled and still self-righteous.

"Aang needs a firebending teacher," she says plainly, swiping at the mud clinging to her skirts, "and beyond that, frankly, _isn't your business_." She molds the mud together the best she can—_it wobbles too much, too much dirt, not enough water_—and lets it drop into the rickety, abandoned rowboat underneath the dock.

"Where's your sister anyway?"

He flinches so hard, grinds his teeth so roughly that she's surprised that porcelain skin doesn't shatter, those pearly, white teeth don't chip away. She stares openly at his differences now than when she observed him under pale green lights. His hair falls _everywhere_, tickles the furrow of his brow, shades over the bright scar on his cheek, past his ears.

"I made a mistake—" he starts, but it's _wrong_, his words, they're all wrong; Katara doesn't even realize she's wrapped his body in ice until he's yelping and toppling into the water, into the mud, and _he can't breathe there_, and—

She's so angry that she's nearly killed him.

Katara ambles off of the dock into the shallow water and adheres her icy hands to his icy armor, yanks back with as much force as she can muster until his sharp gasp cuts through the air. Katara heaves him backwards, spins him to face her.

She's surprised to see, more than the mud splattered across his cheeks, the widened eyes glaring back at her distrustfully, as if she's stabbed him in the back while smiling in his face.

"How does it feel?" she asks as she climbs back onto the dock, pulls clean water to smooth the dirt off of her legs, "to have had to trust me with your life after everything you've done?" _To me_, floats in the air, but Katara only focuses on water, fluid, soothing motions.

She hears the drip of melted ice and turns her head away as he pulls himself back onto the dock, his chest still rising and falling rapidly, "…terrifying."

…

She's surprised when she hears his heavy steps creaking but she doesn't stop filtering mud from clean water, piling dirt and sludge into the old rowboat, not until he steps into the space beside her, water soaking him. He can't bend it away the way she can so she doesn't understand, but he doesn't try to.

He simply submerges his hand in the clean space of water, lifts his hand and lets it filter between his fingers.

"You're back soon," she snaps.

He doesn't miss a beat. "I wanted to ask you something."

"No."

He pauses, but continues. "I could teach the Avatar firebending."

"His name is Aang," she clarifies in annoyance, "and _no_."

"You could have killed me, why didn't you?"

"Lapse in judgment," she slings a portion of mud aggressively, ignores how he frowns when it splatters against him in the crossfire.

"Why are you cleaning this river? Isn't that a waste of time?"

Katara freezes, shoots him a pointed look as if the answer is supposed to be obvious. She wants to rip into him for interrogating her, tell him to go wade in deeper water, but her mouth opens to answer. "It's a perfectly good river," she explains as she continues cleansing, "it's just dirty, uncared for. It's not a waste of time; it'll help people," and she leans down to scoop more mud away.

She glances at him and can see the works of a compelling argument on the horizon. She imagines threading water through bits of Zuko's personality, siphoning out the dirty tendrils where he'd lost his way, ridding him of the toxic waste of his own past. Then, it'd just be the two of them, wading in deep, dark water together.

…

He comes every day for a week, stands in the water under the waxing of the moon in the middle of the night.

He talks more than she talks, doesn't do much else other than that.

Sometimes, when he heats the dark water around him, Katara notices how pure it is, and even though it is for elemental reasons, it surprises her because it's _him_.

She doesn't _ever_ tell him to go away.

…

"Aang," he says, the name ringing oddly from his lips. Katara looks up at him, mud cupped in her small hands, and quirks an eyebrow at him. "I'm not _like _my sister," he says with a hint of desperation, "I'm…redeemable, still. I'd like to be. And I'd like to help."

The words hang in the air as if Katara is the only one with the power to decide his fate.

She dumps the mud from her hands and doesn't speak, doesn't acknowledge him at all.

…

"You look beautiful like this," and she isn't surprised to hear his voice marred with distaste and condescension and awe, because that's all a part of his nature, to be in constant, paradoxical contradiction with himself.

What confuses her the most is the fact that he's held her veil aloft and pressed his fingers into the thick of her curly hair, made her so nervous that she bites down on her bottom lip, the bitter taste of red paint staining the inside of her mouth, threatening to pulse with blood.

It's ironic that he finds her beautiful on a night where she thinks the opposite, on a night where she is unsure there is anything other than treachery in her intentions, that somewhere she had been pure in heart and something had touched her, had _tainted_ her.

He knows it's her. There's something that ties them together, she's sure that he'd recognize her anywhere. "Katara," he says with this softness in his voice, foreign and frightening, and she knows he won't change anything.

When he kisses her, she feels a surprising emptiness, like he's inhaling her out of her own skeleton, breathing in her skin and bones and the scent of the ocean salt tangled in her hair.

She still blows up the factory, because he changes _nothing_. Whatever she's starting to feel for him, though…

That may change everything.

…


End file.
